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PNAS: Alric, Veterinary Pathologist

(On July 16, 2009, I asked for volunteers with science degrees and non-academic jobs who would be willing to be interviewed about their careers paths, with the goal of providing young scientists with more information about career options beyond the pursuit of a tenure-track faculty job that is too often assumed as a default. This post is one of those interviews, giving the responses of Alric, a veterinary pathologist at a drug company) 1) What is your non-academic job? I am toxicologic veterinary pathologist and work at a contract research organization. We use animal models to evaluate the…

links for 2009-07-16

Bad Boys | Film | A.V. Club "From this rich central dynamic, all manner of hilarity springs. Smith is fastidious about the upkeep of his expensive sports car. Lawrence is a slob who gets his messy hamburger all over its glistening interior! How will they ever be able to work together? My curiosity was piqued! Incidentally, since Iâm writing about Michael Bay, I feel it is only appropriate to use as many exclamation points as possible, in a futile attempt to convey the mind-bogglingly extreme and in-your-face nature of Bayâs work. Whose face is Bay in? Mine. Yours. Societyâs." (tags: movies…

How Not to Break Into Publishing

One of the fun thing about being at home for a weekend is that I get to see a close-up view of the death of the American newspaper. When I was a kid, Binghamton had two daily papers, the Sun-Bulletin and the Evening Press, published in the morning and evening, respectively (bet you couldn't've guessed that). They merged into the Press and Sun-Bulletin in the early 80's, and ave been declining ever since. These days, it takes about fifteen minutes to read the whole thing cover to cover. Twenty on Sunday. Today's edition, though, includes a story on self-publishing, which is a sad reminder that…

The Physics of NASCAR by Diandra Leslie-Pelecky

When this first came out, I didn't pick it up, despite a glowing recommendation from Jennifer Ouellette, because NASCAR is one of the few things on ESPN that interests me less than baseball. I didn't really think I'd be interested in reading a whole book on the subject. I saw Jennifer and Diandra on Bloggingheads a little while back, and she made it sound pretty interesting. And then I saw that she was giving a public lecture at DAMOP, and figured it would be good for airplane reading on the way down and back. The Preface gives a nice description of how she came to write the book:…

Less Is Also Difficult

I'm an experimentalists through and through, and have always known better than to attempt real theory. On two occasions, though, I've been forced to do a little bit of computer simulation work in order to interpret my results. One of these was for the time-resolved collisions experiment, and worked out well. The other was when I was a post-doc, and was... less useful. The situation we were dealing with in my post-doc work was a Bose-Einstein condensate of rubidium that we chopped into several pieces with an optical lattice. Whenever you do this, there is necessarily some uncertainty in the…

Rock Stars of Science

So, if you look at this picture: You might be asking yourself "Why does Debbie Harry rate Secret Service protection?" But no, this isn't a photo from some alternate universe where the lead singer of Blondie went on to become leader of the free world, it's part of the Rock Stars of Science campaign by the Geoffrey Beene Foundation. They've just rolled out a new campaign in GQ magazine, putting seventeen prominent biomedical researchers in fancy photo spreads with eight different musicians. It's part of an initiative to raise the profile of science by portraying scientists in a more glamorous…

Bad Universe, No Biscuit

Sunday was a really long day around Chateau Steelypips, and I couldn't see staying awake to watch the premiere of Phil Plait's Bad Universe on the Discovery Channel, so I'm way late in writing about it. I DVRed it, though, and watched it last night. The theme of the premiere/ pilot was killer rocks from out of space, and focused on Phil getting his MythBusters on to test various ideas about asteroid or comet impacts and how to stop them. They blew up a scale model, shot projectiles into various types of rock to simulate nuclear bombs or kinetic impacts, all in the name of testing what would…

How to Teach Physics to Your Dog: Obsessive Update

Today is the first day of classes, and to celebrate, I've come down with the Martian death virus that Kate and SteelyKid have had the last few weeks. Joy. This calls for a How to Teach Physics to Your Dog update, to distract myself from the cotton balls and vacuum pump oil that have apparently been stuffed into my sinuses: The primary news is that Peter Woit has posted a review, in which he says mostly good things: While Brian Greene in his Elegant Universe Nova special introduced general relativity by trying to discuss it with a dog, concluding that "No matter how hard you try, you can't…

Links for 2009-11-10

A New Spacecraft to Explore on Waves of Light - NYTimes.com "About a year from now, if all goes well, a box about the size of a loaf of bread will pop out of a rocket some 500 miles above the Earth. There in the vacuum it will unfurl four triangular sails as shiny as moonlight and only barely more substantial. Then it will slowly rise on a sunbeam and move across the stars." (tags: science space technology overbye) News: Engaged or Confused? - Inside Higher Ed "[The National Survey of Student Engagement] "fails to meet basic standards for validity and reliability," writes Stephen R.…

What the Pope's Astronomer Thinks

Over at Physics and Physicists, ZapperZ notes a fairly useless interview with Guy Consolmagno, and suggests some alternative questions: 1. How old do you estimate the universe to be based not only on your observation, but also the consensus among astronomers? Would this be contrary to the biblical interpretation on the age of the universe? What about the Young Earth's interpretation of the age of the universe? 2. What is your view of the treatment received by Galileo by the church? {Oh c'mon, you knew that one was coming, didn't you?} These would be better questions than what was asked in…

Nationalism and Science

Via email, Mike Steeves points me to an Ars Technica article about a Thomson Reuters report on the "decline in American science": The US is beginning to lose its scientific dominance. That's the message from Thomson Reuters, the people behind EndNote and impact factors. According to a report in their publication ScienceWatch, the US' science output is in a shallow decline at the same time that Asia is in the ascendancy. If it sounds like you've heard that before, you've been paying attention. Back in 2006 the National Science Foundation's biennial Science and Engineering Indicators report…

links for 2009-02-25

slacktivist: Saving newspapers "I'm glad at least though that Time and Isaacson are trying to deal with the question of newspapers' survival. That's more than I can say for many of the newspapers themselves. Take for example my employer, the largest newspaper chain in the country. They own dozens of newspapers, small and large, which puts them in an ideal position to experiment with various approaches and business models to figure out what is and isn't working. But they don't seem interested in such experimentation -- instead remaining focused on uniformity throughout the chain, as though…

Essential Skills and Experiences?

Like a lot of physics departments, we offer an upper-level lab class, aimed at juniors and seniors. There are a lot of ways to approach this sort of course, but one sensible way to think about it is in terms of giving students essential skills and experiences. That is, i's a course in which they learn to do the things that no physics major should graduate without doing. I'm sure that other disciplines do something similar, so I thought I might throw this out there as a general question: What are the essential skills and experiences a student ought to have before graduating with a degree in…

Grading Methods Don't Matter

Over at Dot Physics, Rhett is pondering grading curves: Should you grade on a curve or not? If you are student, the answer is clear: go by whatever the instructor does. Otherwise, you have a choice. I don't like to tell other instructors or faculty what to do because I respect their freedom. For my classes, there is no curve. Why? Well, the question really is: "why grade on a curve?" I don't know the exact reason for particular instructors, but I can come up with some possible reasons. My first few years teaching, I worried about this quite a bit. I talked to different faculty in the…

Falling Into Atomville

The Physics and Astronomy colloquium this week was by Jill Linz from Skidmore, talking about a couple of physics outreach programs she's worked on. This being right up my alley, I made it a point to get in early enough to see the colloquium (I spent the morning at home with the sick SteelyKid, and Kate was good enough to come home for the afternoon), before giving an exam in the afternoon. Linz took a somewhat different approach to physics outreach than a lot of other projects, which tend to focus on high-school students taking physics. She pointed out that if you look at the full student…

Why I Won't Make It as a Philosopher

I think I missed this the first time around, but this weekend, I watched the bloggingheads conversation about quantum mechanics between Sean Carroll and David Albert. In it, David makes an extended argument against the Many-Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics (starting about 40:00 into the conversation). The problem is, I can't quite figure out what the problem is supposed to be. The argument has something to do with a thought experiment in which you take a million particles, prepared in a state such that a measurement of their spin will give an equal probability of measuring "up" or…

On the Asking of Hard Questions

Janet posted a few days ago about asking questions of grad students in seminars and journal clubs and so on. This is part of a larger conversation that I'm too lazy to collect links to-- Janet has them-- about whether grad students should show solidarity with their fellows and refrain from asking tough questions of each other in public. It's an interesting question, and the sort of thing I would ordinarily be all over, but my graduate experience was idiosyncratic enough that I don't think I can say anything that would generalize well. I was officially a student in the Chemical Physics Program…

Dinner With ΔKE

As mentioned previously, I was invited to discuss physics and politics at one of the local fraternities earlier this week. Oddly, given the primacy of Greek organizations on campus, this is only the fourth time I've set foot inside a fraternity or sorority house in seven years. The previous occasions were times when I was doing housing inspections for the committee that handles those matters. They've cleaned up the house since the other time I was there-- they used to be Φ Γ Δ, years ago, and then there was a brief interregnum when they were officially "Alpha Beta" (referred to as "oh, those…

ER Problems; Insurance Problems

These two things might be connected.  The Washington Post reported yesterday on the findings of a CDC report on emergency room preparedness.  The Economic Policy Institute reported on further erosion in health insurance coverage. href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/09/27/AR2006092701831.html?referrer=scienceblogs.com">Crowded ERs Raise Concerns On Readiness By Christopher Lee Washington Post Staff Writer Thursday, September 28, 2006; Page A11 Emergency rooms at many hospitals are routinely stretched to the breaking point, raising concerns that they…

Republicans target myrmecology as "pure waste"

The Republican Party speaks: GOP senators on Tuesday highlighted âpure wasteâ in the billions of stimulus funds spent this year, including money for fossil research in Argentina, puppet shows and to protect cruise ships from terrorist attacks... What does the Republican Party consider wasteful? Science, apparently: Half a million dollars went to Arizona State University to study the genetic makeup of ants to determine distinctive roles in ant colonies; $450,000 went to the University of Arizona to study the division of labor in ant colonies. âI had no idea that so much expertise concerning…

JAM Redux: Talking with the media about your research

Blog friend Pat Campbell and her colleagues Susan Metz, and Jennifer Weisman gave a great talk at JAM on getting your research message out to the press. Key ideas, themselves tailored to this audience: MEDIA SURPRISE: don't agree to an on the spot interview; research the journalist first. What part of the newspaper are they writing for? Who are they writing for? What is the angle? What is the deadline? Who else are they interviewing? Get background material on the journalist and have it written down. HAVE A MESSAGE and tailor it to your audience. Your results are going to be…

Not like a worm?

Ann Coulter is back to whining about evolution again, and this week she focuses on fossils. It's boring predictable stuff: there are no transitional fossils, she says. We also ought to find a colossal number of transitional organisms in the fossil record - for example, a squirrel on its way to becoming a bat, or a bear becoming a whale. (Those are actual Darwinian claims.) Darwin postulated that whales could have evolved from bears, but he was wrong…as we now know because we found a lot of transitional fossils in whale evolution. Carl Zimmer has a summary of recent discoveries, and I wrote…

It's spring, and bears are in the air.

One my friends lives outside of Anchorage, Alaska and recently had a black bear pay a visit to her backyard. Now her preschoolers are obsessed with bears. Minnow too has a bit of a bear obsession at the moment, though she hasn't seen any bears in their natural habitat. At school, she's been reading "We're Going on a Bear Hunt" and at home one of her favorite books is the "Berenstain Bear's Big Honey Hunt." Saturday morning, Minnow announced that we were going on a bear hunt, or maybe that we were going to look for bees that would, presumably, lead us to bears. We made it all the way to the…

RBOC: Alice's March Catch-up edition

Okay, so what on earth *have* I been up to, if not blogging? I'm catching you up (rather like the recitative bits in opera - dry, dull, but advancing the action, rather than arias which are beautiful but don't get you anywhere much) with some RBOCs... As previously mentioned, I had a trip to Washington DC for a symposium on engineering education research. I've uploaded some photos here if you want to see the outcomes of the sticky-note brainstorm (the funnest part of the conference!). I did get a pretty awesome dinner with some attendees: I submitted an IEECI grant, my first PI…

What are you good at? (Part II)

Wow. You all rock. You are good at so many wonderful things - I am impressed. Yesterday's question was prompted by the introductory activity at a COACh workshop that I had the privilege of attending. The workshop focused on developing the negotiating skills of women in STEM, and I highly recommend it and the other workshops they offer. After coffee and bagels, our facilitators asked us to stand up and introduce ourselves to the group by saying what we were good at professionally. And then they showed us how our answers were weak and could be improved. Here's my response: "I think I'm good…

Not industry, not academia - how about the FDA?

I see you - I've been there. You're sitting in the lab the day before New Year's Eve looking at what you've done over the last year - or last six years - and thinking about how you're ever going to turn this postdoc or extended grad school period into some gainful career. The economy is for hell no matter where you live and you're wondering if this is all worth it. Well, as I've said before, don't limit your options until you explore them. The US drug, medical device, food, cosmetic regulatory and safety agency, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), can provide a really satisfying…

Eve Carson murder suspects and the Intel Science Talent Search winner

It's been a roller coaster of a week for Charles E Jordan High School in Durham, North Carolina. (Wikipedia history here). As we noted earlier this week, Jordan's Shivani Sud took first prize in the Intel Science Talent Search for her work on biochemical markers of stage II colon cancer. The Intel (formerly Westinghouse) Science Talent prize is referred to often as the "junior Nobel prize." Two and three days later, we learned the identities of the suspects apprehended in the murder of Eve Carson, student body president at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Both young men,…

New pharmacy student blog: introducing Secundum Artem

As a pharmacy professor, I've been surprised at how few blogs out there are written by pharmacists or pharmacy students. In my subjective observations, there are tons of blogs written by physicians and nurses. There are about 200,000 registered pharmacists in the US, about one-fourth the number of physicians so it's not as though pharmacists are terribly outnumbered by other healthcare professionals. So, it was with great pleasure that I stumbled onto Secundum Artem via a comment by the author, N.B., in a thread on Respectful Insolence. Secundum artem is a Latin phrase meaning "according…

Alpha-lipoic acid trial for chemotherapy-induced peripheral neuropathy

The weekly NCI Cancer Bulletin recently featured a clinical trial being led by MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston where the supplement, alpha-lipoic acid, is being investigated to minimize the peripheral neuropathy associated with platinum-based chemotherapy such as cisplatin or oxaliplatin. Peripheral neuropathy is an unpleasant side effect of platinum-based chemotherapy that is characterized by a burning, numbness, and or tingling in the extremities. The acute form of the syndrome resolves a few days after the platinum treatment but sometimes persists. A similar syndrome occurs in…

Well, I sure hope I make you think

The relatively recent addition to ScienceBlogs, first-year medical resident, Signout, very generously tagged me with recognition as a "Thinking Blogger" on her list of "Five Blogs that Make Me Think." This meme was started in early February by Ilker Yoldas for peers to recognize content-rich blogs. Signout was all too kind: A neighbor here at SB, Abel Pharmboy is a pharmacologist who writes critically and eloquently about all manner of issues in drug research and development. He's consistently both interesting and educational, and handles even conceptually dense issues with a light touch. I…

Tin-eared Martin Cothran

Cothran, an analyst for one of those right-wing religious think tanks, the Family Patriarchy Foundation, has written an op-ed rebuking the University of Kentucky for discrimination against Christians. It is breathtakingly ridiculous. He claims that the reason Gaskell was not hired was religious oppression, overt discrimination against him for the fact of being a Christian. A university in America would have virtually no faculty or staff if they had an unspoken policy of discrimination against the Christian majority in this country; there were believers on that committee, I'm sure, just as…

Too few genes to survive - the bacterium with the world's smallest genome

The complex cells that make up plants and animals only survive today because their ancestors formed partnerships with bacteria. In a previous post, I wrote about a microbe called Hatena, which provides us with a snapshot of what the early stages of this alliance might have looked like. Hatena swallows an alga which becomes an integrated part of its body. Millions of years ago, the ancestors of complex cells did the same thing, taking in bacteria and merging with them to form a single creature. Today, these integrated bacteria are mitochondria, which provide us with energy, and…

I am Pro-Test: Responsible animal testing improves lives of humans, pets

Today at the University of California at Los Angeles, a rally is planned to raise awareness about the value of responsible animal research and to denounce acts of terrorism toward animal researchers and their families. The highlight of the Pro-Test rally will be the presentation to legislators and the media a petition with nearly 12,000 signatures of scientists who support the use of animals in research. The rally and the petition drive is a joint effort of Americans for Medical Progress, Pro-Test for Science, and Speaking of Research. I stand together with my colleagues who conduct animal…

Zenph Studios now hiring music analyst and technology coordinator for "re-performances"

Audio documentarian, local hero, and Pharmboy family friend, Richard Ziglar, let us know over the weekend of some employment opportunities for music and tech-minded folks at Zenph Studios in Research Triangle Park. What is Zenph, you ask? Zenph takes classic piano recordings, often from long-departed performers, dissects them digitally to capture nuances of the live performance, and then "re-performs" them live in a recital hall on legendary Steinways driven by the software. These are *not* digital remasterings but recordings of an actual replaying of the original work. Listen to this…

Canada's dismal record supporting science

I have no idea if there's a new team of editorialists at Nature or if the old team has simply decided it's time they started to stir the pot. But they've been an ornery lot of late, and this swipe at the Canadian government's failure to respect science's contribution to society is a welcome wakeup call: When the Canadian government announced earlier this year that it was closing the office of the national science adviser, few in the country's science community were surprised. Science has long faced an uphill battle for recognition in Canada, but the slope became steeper when the Conservative…

A new Dark Age descends upon us (revisited)

[This post is rewritten to reflect a clearer state of mind.] The front-page editors of the local newspapers here in the Blue Ridge Mountains of western North Carolina had a tough time deciding on today's banner headline. Should it be the shootings at Virginia Tech or the damage wreaked by Monday's windstorm, which left much of this part of the state without electricity and destroyed what was left of the economically vital apple orchards not killed by last week's freezing temperatures. There's no way to spin any of it into the good news ledger, and I don't have access to my own computer files…

Texas and a techology fetish

Texas Gov. Rick Perry is having a bad week. The state House Public Health Committee just voted to rescind the governor's executive order requiring all pre-teen girls to be vaccinated against HPV and a county judge ruled against another executive order requiring the state to fast-track a review of proposed coal-fired power plants. On the surface, the two decisions point to conflicting political motivations, but I see a connection. Perry's order that all young girls should have the benefit of Merck's new vaccine against a virus that causes cervical cancer constitutes a nice big Valentine's…

Astronomy: What is it good for?

The juxtaposition in recent news lineups of the debate over the definition of a planet and the depressing debacle in Lebanon puts the lie to the idea we live in a global village. While some of us are lucky enough to be paid to argue over whether "hydrostatic equilibrium" is enough to warrant planethood, others are trying to figure out whether it's worth rebuilding their family homestead, which has just been bombed into rubble. Again. Given this particular historical context, it only seems to fair to check on what astronomy is really good for -- other than giving us something more valuable to…

George Bush, Hans Bethe and big questions

Former science columnist turned blogger and all-round wise old guy Chet Raymo writes on his blog today that his Irish neighbors don't understand what's going on in America when it comes to the ascendancy of religiosity. I don't have an answer, but his question suggests a possible answer to a problem identified, co-incidentally, in today's Science magazine. First, Chet's Irish friend's poser: What puzzles the Irish is how a nation unequaled in its scientific and technical prowess can at the same time be so in thrall to what they see as rank superstition. To their mind, there is little…

The Theoretical Minimum, by Susskind & Hrabovsky

The Theoretical Minimum: What You Need to Know to Start Doing Physics When this book appeared in my mailbox I judged it by its cover and was a little concerned. The problem with the cover is the name of one of the authors: Leonard Susskind. He's an extremely talented physicist and writer, to be sure, but he's a string theorist. Worse, he's one of the major names behind the string theory landscape idea. Though not a high-energy physicist myself and thus not really being terribly qualified to judge, I tend to classify the string theory landscape as somewhere between speculative and…

Sunday Function

In pure mathematics there's not too many function studied more than the Riemann zeta function. For reasons of historical tradition, the generic variable name that's usually used is s instead of z. (The function is mostly interesting in terms of complex analysis, so x would be a bit unorthodox too.) It's defined in the following way: On the real line, it looks like this: Not terribly exciting, most of the interesting action happens for complex values of s. The reason that the action is interesting is that the zeta function is intimately connected to the prime numbers, despite there being no…

Football and Error

Over at Uncertain Principles, Chad is talking football. There's this pesky problem of spotting the ball at the end of the play. In a game where fractions of an inch can make or break the end result, too often the issue is determined by a more or less random guess by the referee of where the ball stopped. Instant replay has helped the issue, but not come anywhere close to fixing it. It's too imprecise and often made less useful because there's enormous football players diving for the ball and thus obscuring it from the cameras. There's good suggestions. DGPS, radar, optical tracking, and…

The hypocrites of Polk County, Florida

Polk County, Florida has a public school board that meets in the county school district auditorium to discuss the secular, governmental functions of running the public schools. Despite their purpose, though, they insist on opening with a prayer, a practice which has encountered some criticism and which they have dealt with evasively and dishonestly. Earlier this month, the School Board began a new practice in which the board placed a disclaimer on the meeting agenda and held a prayer before the meeting officially began. The policy change came after a letter from the Freedom From Religion…

The Bible of Physics

The Feynman Lectures are the bible of physics. Because it's the definitive and authoritative sacred text? Nope. Because everyone has it but not many people have actually read it. This is too bad. The lectures are a fantastic way to learn about physics. Richard Feynman was a brilliant physicist, one of the true titans of modern science. Unlike most great scientists, he was also tremendously charismatic, a ladies man, musician, adventurer, and a skilled popular writer. Sometimes science snobs look down on the cult of Feynman popularity, but this is just sour grapes. The man really was…

Rowing as a group increases pain thresholds

You may have seen rowing before, but I guarantee you that you know little about the sport unless you went to university at Cambridge or Oxford. There you will find a subspecies of human known as the "boatie" who seem perfectly happy to gather en masse at godforsaken times of the morning to paddle about on a river. In the rain. In winter. With a hangover. Later, in the pub, they will spend innumerable hours discussing their training schedules, talking about "catching crabs" without a hint of irony and comparing blisters. For those of us who wondered what could possess grown men and women to…

Where in the world is Dave Ng? (plus a World's Fair flavoured ad for interns)

My apologies for being more or less absent in the last three weeks or so, but I promise to get back to form on Monday. In particular, it's kind of cool that The World's Fair has been around for a whole year, which has led me to think about a readership drive (maybe another intern?) As well, I just returned from San Francisco, and am loaded with enthusiasm to start my next science education project (the visit involved a Pirate store). Anyway, more on this later... A picture of some street art in San Francisco. Image by Mr. Waldo Actually, an intern sounds like a good idea, so lets put…

Scientists of Comedy? Or just (non-mystery) Science Theater...

All together, how about the Galileo Players, Carl Djerassi, Roald Hoffman, Tom Stoppard, and Michel Frayn, for starters. Those, in addition to Playwright Kathryn Walat from this old post. Scientists of Comedy, the Galileo Players call themselves. Or, officially: "The Galileo Players are a professional sketch comedy and improv troupe that writes and performs original comedic theater focusing on scientific, philosophical and intellectual themes." They claim to have beem inspired by Galileo's ideas and life. I cannot vouch for their comedic qualities, but can observe that theirs is an…

My Honda Civic and offsetting its 6 and a half story high fart bubble.

So I went to a site today called Cool Drive Pass, which is a carbon offsetting project spearheaded by some colleagues of mine at UBC and their friends in Vancouver. Essentially, it's a calculator designed to figure out carbon dioxide emissions of your car, and then to equate an "offsetting fee," where the funds would essentially go to some renewable energy project. Anyway, carbon offsetting is a bit of contentious issue, since it's viewed by many a stalwart environmentalist as a step, even a step in the right direction, but more likely a step that condones complacency. In other words, some…

Campus Sustainability -- reducing energy use without the nuclear option

There are a range of campus sustainability initiatives across the US and across the world (though the US needs them more). There's even a conference this week at Arizona State held by the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education. One nice opportunity with campus-wide approaches is that they can avoid being "sustainable" for the sake of "sustainable development." Most efforts that use the sustainable term are, to be sure, aiming to develop their incomes and resource uses in sustainable ways, not to sustain the earth and ecological health. They are, in other…

Brain treats tools as temporary body parts

In martial arts classes, students are often taught to treat weapons as extensions of their own body. But this is more than just a metaphor. It turns out that when we use tools - not just swords and spears, but toothbrushes and rakes as well - our brain treats them as temporary body parts. According to some psychologists, our brains rely on a mental representation of our bodies called the "body schema", which allows us to coordinate our various parts and to interact with the world around us. Now, Lucilla Cardinali from INSERM, France has found that we incorporate tools into this mental plan…